How does green finance affect cleaner industrial production and end-of-pipe treatment performance? Evidence from China

Effectively identifying the role and mechanism of green finance in environmental governance provides an important guarantee that green finance serves the ecological environment. Based on the panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2001 to 2015, this paper explores the impact of green finance on cleaner industrial production and end-of-pipe treatment and further reveals the mediating effect of industrial structure optimization and the moderating effect of environmental regulation. The results show that (1) China’s cleaner industrial production performance, end-of-pipe treatment performance and systematic governance performance show a clear upwards trend, distributed in stages in the eastern, central and western regions from high to low. (2) At the national level, green finance promotes cleaner production performance but inhibits end-of-pipe treatment performance. However, it can be seen from the results of the sub-sample, the eastern and central regions are consistent with the overall effect, with heterogeneous effects in the western region. (3) The optimization of industrial structure plays a partial intermediary role in the impact of green finance on cleaner production and end-of-pipe treatment. (4) Both “market-incentive” and “command-and-control” environmental regulations weaken the positive impact of green finance on cleaner production; “market-incentive” environmental regulation alleviates the negative impact of green finance on end-of-pipe treatment, while the moderating effect of “command-and-control” environmental regulation on end-of-pipe treatment is not significant.